Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store--“Sixteen Tons,” Tennessee Ernie Ford, 1955

I lived at the head of Choppin' Branch Road in McRoberts with my wife Debra, just beneath TECO Coal’s mountaintop removal strip mine. Living beneath this mine has been a frightening experience. TECO set off explosives daily that would shake the entire house. I had to go underneath the house more than once to try and repair damage to my foundation.

The blasting was bad, but it was the floods of 2002 that destroyed us. My house and my son’s are located just beneath one of TECO’s valley fills. During the spring and summer of 2002 we experienced more than four flash floods that would leave rocks as big as a cow’s head in my garden. These floods got up under my son’s floor and the clay and mud shifted the posts under his house. One flood even washed out his tool-shed.

The worst came on Christmas morning in 2002. My lovely wife decided that the challenges our family was facing were simply too great and she took her life that morning. She left eight letters describing how she loved us all but that our burdens were just too much to bear. There were a lot of things that lead to my wife taking her life, but TECO’s aggravation was the straw that broke her will. She had begged for TECO to at least replace our garden, but they just turned their back on her.

I look back now and think of all the things I wish I had done differently so that she might still be with us, but mostly I wish that TECO had never started mining above our home. Protection for families like ours is suppose to come from the state and federal regulatory agencies, but instead they look the other way as coal companies destroy entire communities for the sake of profit.

In loving memory of my wife Debra Faye Burke.

Granville Burke
October 2003

Debra Burke took her life on Christmas morning in 2002. Her husband’s letter to the newspaper after that is self-explanatory. I can’t even begin to imagine the sorrow Mr. Burke must have felt.

The tragedy is that it was so easily preventable.

Here is some perspective: Most of the people in Southern Appalachia grow their own food in gardens that they keep year-round. In many cases, this food is for their own consumption, especially during the winter months. Because of the mountains, travel to a grocery store in winter is hazardous, even if there is a grocery nearby, which isn’t always the case. Canning food and keeping it by (called ‘putting food by’) is a normal activity in the late summer and autumn. That food is stored and kept for later.

In the Burke’s case, that garden food is a necessity. It isn’t just extra, it isn’t just a hobby. But TECO didn’t know this, or just didn’t care. They refused on at least four different occasions to respond to the Burke’s request to have the garden replaced. Didn’t even reply. And they talk in their brochures about corporate responsibility.

Economists call Debra Burke’s death an externality. An unanticipated cost of the price of coal. What Americans pay for electricity is based on the price of extracting, cleaning, and shipping coal, which fires the power plants. American power plants annually burn more than a billion tons of coal, which accounts for 50% of the country’s electric use. In Kentucky, 80% of the coal that is mined is sold and shipped to 22 other states. The people of Appalachia pay for this cheap source of energy dearly, through contaminated water, flooding, cracked walls and foundations, contaminated drinking wells, bronchial problems related to breathing coal dust, torn up roads due to overweight and speeding coal trucks. Death. Cancer that is way above the national average. Liver problems, spleen problems, gall bladder problems. Children attending school in the shadow of a sludge lake that contains nearly 3 billion gallons of toxic waste behind a dam that is constantly leaking. In one town in West Virginia, 98% of the people on one street had their gall bladders removed as a result of drinking contaminated water.

Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, New York, Seattle all get the coal but none of the consequences of its extraction. No one in these places dies because coal is mined in Kentucky. No one in Tampa is any the worse off because TECO has a mining operation in McRoberts, Kentucky. The people of Southern Appalachia have paid for the coal use of everyone else with their health, their lives, and with the life of the mountains.